Wednesday, June 11, 2014

Staunton, June 11 – Unlike Spain
which turned to economic modernization only seven years after the beginning of
political modernization, a pattern that prevented the recrudescent of the past,
Russia’s leaders chose the reverse, enriching themselves but opening the way
for a return to support for Soviet-style imperialism, according to Emil Pain.

And it is that imperialism rather
than Russian nationalism, the Moscow expert on inter-ethnic relations says,
which animates some ethnic Russians in Donetsk, Luhansk and Transdniestria and
increasingly infects public discourse and policy choices in Moscow

In the latest of his series of
articles on identity and politics in Eurasia, Pain focuses on “the process of
the construing of tradition or more precisely on imperial traditionalism as a
militant ideology.” He does so by considering how Russians and especially
Russian leaders reacted to the consequences of the disintegration of the USSR.

Almost
immediately after the collapse, a small number of Russian politicians talked
about the need for restoring the empire.Gennady Zyuganov, the head of the KPRF, for example, declared
that”without the reunification of the now divide Russian people, our state will
not be able to rise from its knees.”

But
at the time, such appeals received little support, Pain notes. “Only 9.3
percent of ethnic Russiansand only 12.9 percent of representatives of other
nationalities said that they felt ‘a sense of community with the peoples and
histories” of the union republics that had become independent. And they showed
that they had very little interest in these places.

In 1993, the Congress of Russian Communitiess (KRO) was
set up and sought to transform the ethnic Russians in the former Soviet
repubics “into a powerful force and a weapon for Russian irredentism, that is,
for the unification of the Russian world around Russia.”But nothing serious arose from this.

Pain argues that “until the
mid-1990s,” statists and extreme nationalists regularly claimed they had
popular support for the reunification of the USSR “without the slightest basis”
for such claims. “That was a time when not the liberals as nnot but the
representatives of the so-called national patriotic forces called television a zombie
maker.”

But
the difficulties Russia faced in making reforms and especially its pursuit of economic
reforms in advance of political ones, the Moscow scholar continues, had the
effect of making ever more Russians tired and angry about what they were going
through and thus led some of them to conclude that the socialism of the past “was
not so bad; what was bad was its leaders.”

That shift in public attitudes abou
socialism and the Soviet Union, he continues, rapidly affected ideas about who is
the enemy of Russia.In Soviet times, he
notes, “the West was considered not only a geopolitical opponent but also a
class enemy, with which it as impossible to reach a compromise.”

“The only time when the political
elite of the USSR and then of Russia proclaimed as its slogan a return to ‘the
family of civilized peoples’ and ‘to Europe’ was in the period from the end of
the 1980s to the beginning of the 1990s.”

As that attitude lost ground, ever
more often Russians in the Russian Federation and Russians outside it began to talk
about Russophobia. Indeed, Pain says, it became the dominant motif in the
thinking of the leaders of the self-proclaimed Transdniestr Republic “and in
the movements which call themselves the Donetsk and Luhansk republics.”

In them, the scholar continues, “the
consolidation of these communities lies not with a Russian ethnic idea but with
a Soviet political one.”

During the 1990s, he says, “Soviet consciousness
returned and then after this step by step the idea of empire was rehabilitated.”
“Empire” and its derivatives became a term of praise rather than of abuse in
various business activities. For example, he notes, “the most popular kinds of
Russian vodka in many regions of Russia arecalled ‘Empire’ or ‘Imperial.’”

Many
analysts point to “the phenomenon of empire” as the reason for the lack of
success in Russia of the democratic transformation, with some stressing its
current manifestations and others pointing to the burden of the past.But Pain insists that the influence of this
factor was self-consciously boosted by Russian leaders on the basis of their
view of the past and present.

Promoting
such a traditionalist value allowed them to contain and redirect popular anger
over the difficulties of economic reforms and to keep them under control,
something it has been far easier to do if they are inthrall to “fears and
phobias.” Unfortunately, “both imperial stereotypes and phobias, are easy to
set in flame but difficult to extinguish.”

Pain cites with
approval Dominic Lieven’s argument that “an empire by definition is the
antithesis of democracy, popular sovereignty, and national self-determination.”
It is about “the sovereignty of the ruler” not “the sovereignty of the people.”
And he notes that Vladimir Putin clearly views empire as a positive reason for
precisely that reason.

Unlike
in Spain where all political parties committed themselves to political reforms
before economic one and thus ensured that democratization would be
irreversible, “in Russia the elite which directed the political process pursued
totally different goals: it would to become as rapidly as possible a class of
major property owners and enter the global ratings as among the richest people
of the world.”

Given that, Pain continues, “democratization in a
well-known sense could become a threat to the dominating role of oligarchic
Russian capitalism which rapidly lost its reformist impulse and became a
defender of conservative political traditions,” including authoritarianism and
imperialism.

The Moscow analyst writes tht “a movement
to democracy and modernization is possible only if society does not make
concessions to political fundamentalism” which is being used to block such a
movement. So far, Russia has once again been an example of how not to proceed,
something unintentionally acknowledged by its leaders when they talk about “a
special path.”

Despite where the Russian elite is,
he concludes, there is some basis for optimism.According to a March 2014 Levada Center poll, nearly 40 of Russians and
more than 50 percent of Muscovites want Russia to follow a European rather than
Eurasian course, despite all the anti-Western “hysteria” in the media.